by Tang Huyen

Hinduism takes Maya physicalistically. Buddhism takes the same view — which is about things — and interprets it about the discursive mind. Only our interpretative layer is false, not what it receives in the raw and then interprets.

You have presented the standard Hinduist view rather than
any Buddhist view.

Hinduism takes Maya physicalistically, as all that appears
to us in its multiplicity. All this manifold is false, to
Hinduism, and one has to see through it and past it to the
underlying Oneness, Brahman, the One without a second.

Buddhism takes the same view — which is about things (de
re) — and interprets it about the discursive mind (de
intellectu). What appears to us is real and true as it is,
and only our mentation and discrimination (they are the
same process) makes it false, by dividing up the whole
received in sensation according to mental baskets and
cages — our concepts and categories, structures and
frameworks — and processing the resulting bits accordingly.
We need only to quiesce our mentation and discrimination
to receive reality (what happens) as it is, and not as we
wish it to be or think it to be. Only our interpretative
layer is false, not what it receives in the raw and then
interprets.

This interpretative layer creates the self and
what-belongs-to-self, the "I" and mine, in addition to all
the things and objects of our daily life, like tables and
chairs, cats and people. All these entities and
non-entities are created by dividing up the whole
received in sensation according to mental baskets and
cages — our concepts and categories, structures and
frameworks — and processing the resulting bits accordingly.
These entities and non-entities are dependent on mentation
and derived by abstraction, not given in sensation as such
(namely, as we conceive them, think them and name them),
though some of them are closer to sensation than others,
which can be completely dissociated from sensation.

So Buddhism takes Maya to be the interpretation, and only
seeks to see it, see through it, see past it, to the
reality which is free from it, which is simply what happens.

What remains in that non-mentative and non-discriminative
state is just raw sensation, shorn of all symbolic
activities. There is no mediation in it, but what occurs
stops right there (though the content keeps changing, due
to impermanence). There is no effort to stabilise anything
through concepts and categories, structures and frameworks,
but what happens simply flows on and on.

This state is as far from anthropomorphism as anything that
can be imagined.

By the way, papañca "proliferation, profusion" is
interpreted differently in Hinduism and Buddhism. In
Hinduism it means the manifold development of the world,
physically. In Buddhism it means only our mental
development (mentation, discrimination, interpretation) on
top of sensation. Sensation itself is free of it.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on June 6, 2004. Author: Tang Huyen (Laughing Buddha, Inc.). Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

Tang Huyen was a scholar of Buddhist studies with deep command of Pāli, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan sources. Posting to talk.religion.buddhism and related groups from 2003 to 2008, he was among the most rigorous analytical voices in the English-language Buddhist Usenet world. This post clarifies a persistent confusion between Hindu and Buddhist metaphysics by introducing the de re / de intellectu distinction: Hinduism locates the problem in the world's multiplicity, Buddhism locates it in the mind's multiplication. The same distinction extends to papañca — a Pāli term that Hindu commentators read as the world's own proliferation, and Buddhist teaching reads as the mind's proliferation over an undivided sensation. Awakening, on the Buddhist account, is not an escape from the manifold world but a cessation of the mentation that fragments it.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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